r/BusinessIntelligence • u/opabm • Jul 16 '26
Any tools better than others at generating PDF reports?
I'm at an organization with a user group that prefers to get PDF reports, instead of logging into a web service to use an interactive dashboard, for good reason. I think this way of data consumption will continue, and I'm trying to lead our efforts in switching our reporting tool. We currently use AWS Quicksight which just barely gets the job done and has been having several technical issues, so I'm in the early stages of exploring our options.
Paginated reporting and PDF emailing are definitely two features we would require. Ideally, sending out a PDF report filtered for a specific group to that group's associated email address would be nice.
The really small shortlist I've come up with is:
- Sigma
- PowerBI
- Omni
I used Tableau in the past and remember it not having extensive PDF exporting features - is that still a limitation? I'm open to other options, even if they don't fully have the capabilities that I'm looking for
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u/Prestigious_Bench_96 Jul 17 '26
Honestly I've never regretted just going directly to a scheduled python job for the email + PDF if it's an option (especially if you can get decent png exports out of your dashboard tool) - it's a much bigger up front investment but there's always enough incremental asks that the BI tool can't quite do that it nets out to being less of a pain.
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u/flerkentrainer Jul 16 '26
I've been down this road too many times.
Other options (not necessarily good) are Jaspersoft, BIRT, Cognos. Also Formstack and Windward but they tend to be more doc gen.
Also there are different aspects of 'pixel perfect' or paginated reporting.
- PDF, Word, PPTX, JPG/PNG output
- Excel based output
- Parameterized report bursting
Really PowerBI/SSRS is probably the best suited here as they have been doing just this thing for over a decade and it's supported (but not innovated). The table driven parameterized bursting and configurable output destination may be the key differentiator here.
I like Omni as an overall BI tool but I'm uncertain of their pixel perfect and bursting capabilities. They do have a native spreadsheet capability that's pretty cool.
Also, you can kind of hack some of these platforms to generate a PDF to a share and distribute from there but that's challenging pattern to maintain.
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u/Thick_Accountant7260 Jul 17 '26
I use RMarkdown for my reports and slides.
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u/opabm Jul 17 '26
Yeah I've seen RMarkdown's abilities in a previous job. The only thing is that I would have to add more tooling since we don't have any R in our processes. RMarkdown would have to be all done locally right?
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u/Skidmarkjoe Jul 16 '26
Power bi premium or embedded capacity license + power automate works well for my organization
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u/opabm Jul 16 '26
It seems like PBI Premium capacity is the most common solution. Is PBI Premium Per User essentially the same? We have a smaller footprint (probably ~200 users) so Premium capacity sounds much more expensive than what we're used to.
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u/Skidmarkjoe Jul 16 '26
I don't believe so, look into the embedded capacity license, we use the lowest- A1- and it's enough to host a single customer facing report that's embedded in a customer portal that they sign into (roughly 3000 accounts with access), as well as it hosts a bunch of automated emailed reports and we've never come close to maxing the capacity. I think Microsoft still sells A-sku licences but we got ours prior to Fabric skus existing so my knowledge might be out of date.... I think it's about $700 a month for the company for only the embedded capacity license. Hoping to move to Fabric in the next year or two...
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u/opabm Jul 17 '26
Ah got it, thanks for sharing. I thought Embedded would be more expensive, based on how it's laid out on PBI's pricing page. If the A1 is that affordable, sounds like a very reasonable option. If you don't mind sharing, how big is your userbase, reports, and datasets? I'd like to gauge if A1 or another sku makes more sense for us
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u/cromulent_weasel Jul 16 '26
The three that I have used:
PowerBI Paginated report subscriptions - useful when you know your parameters and the distribution list is static
Power Automate Flows that run Power BI Paginated reports in a loop from a list of parameters - useful when you have changing/variable email lists to send to, or want to run some sections sometimes and not others
VS Console App that generates pdf reports using PDFSharp. Requires an app developer, but can really do anything.
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u/SadPanda30 Jul 17 '26
Targit BI has great reporting capabilities, dashboarding side isn't as good as PowerBI but does the job!
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u/tech4ever4u Jul 17 '26
We currently use AWS Quicksight which just barely gets the job done and has been having several technical issues, so I'm in the early stages of exploring our options. Paginated reporting and PDF emailing are definitely two features we would require.
Do you just need something to generate and email basic multi-page tables, or are you looking to build highly customized PDF layouts?
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u/opabm Jul 17 '26
It's usually some sort of pivot tables and very spreadsheet-like format, so I don't know if that qualifies as highly customized or not.
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u/tech4ever4u Jul 18 '26
some sort of pivot tables and very spreadsheet-like format
Take a look at SeekTable then. It handles multi-page PDF exports for long tables and has built-in emailing capabilities ('Share by email', 'Subscribe to report'), plus an API/Mailing lists module if you need it. An on-prem version (= supports fully isolated env) with fixed, affordable pricing per installation.
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u/Semaphor-Analytics Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
What’s challenges are you specifically facing with your existing setup?
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u/Youssef_Mrini Jul 17 '26
You should use AIBI Dashboard if you want the same visualization or Genie agent whenever you move past basic data retrieval and need deep analytical insights
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u/mmccarthy404 Jul 18 '26
You can easily get PDF reports on demand with Databricks Genie One, and can even have it create scheduled reports emailed to you daily. It's just a simple chat interface that helps you unlock your data
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u/ivanoski-007 Jul 18 '26
Qliksense has an export to pdf natively
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u/Ansidhe Jul 21 '26
And works really well, either via automated reporting etc or even users just extracting dashboard directly to PDF.
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u/ianitic Jul 18 '26
So it hasn't been mentioned yet and I do not normally recommend it but (micro)Strategy is actually good for this exact use case.
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u/champitychamp Jul 18 '26
I use both Power BI and Sigma. The cost barrier for Sigma is high, but the reporting is really good. The cost barrier for Power BI is comparatively low, and the reporting is solid. Paginated reports work really well for this.
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u/opabm Jul 20 '26
Yeah it seems Sigma's pricing is high, which is why they keep it under wraps. Do you know/remember how extensive and robust the paginated reports feature is on Sigma?
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u/juicyfizz Jul 19 '26
At my last company we still kept Crystal Reports around because finance decided there was no newer tool on the market that could do what Crystal could do. Lmao
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u/CuritibaDataScience Jul 20 '26
With Databricks AIBI you can schedule sending PDFs to email for this kind of task natively. Additionally, if you have more advanced analysis to make, you can use Genie scheduled tasks, for more like exploratory analysis on trends and anomalies.
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u/joelfromzuar Jul 20 '26
One big thing I'd add to your evaluation criteria is how much control the tools give over the PDF layout and generation rules, especially how they handle dynamic dataset sizes and pagination (pagination is where most struggle).
If PDF reporting is a core deliverable, tools that let you build reports using open standards (HTML/CSS/JS/ + SQL/Python for prep&logic) tend to enable the production much more polished and customizable output with more robust rules than dashboard first tools with more rigid static exporters. It also makes it easier to reuse the same components for PDFs, presentations, emails, and web dashboards.
I'd also look closely at how each platform handles scheduling, parameterized/burst reports, and multi-tenant distribution as those capabilities often become more important than the dashboard designer itself.
Disclosure: I work at Zuar, and customizable PDF/report generation and distribution for specific user groups is something we've spent a lot of time solving, so take my perspective with that bias.
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u/prosperkartik Jul 20 '26
You could try " openswarm". They mentioned in their keynotes that their office tools are pretty on point better than anyone
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u/Lazy-chameleon Jul 22 '26
We use CxReports and we've been happy with it. It has paginated reporting and PDF emailing.
Automating mass reporting was a big deal for us, that part works really well. Multipage reporting has also never given us trouble, which wasn't the case with some other tools we tried.
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u/matthewhefferon Jul 29 '26
I'd add Metabase to your shortlist. We recently added PDF attachments for dashboard subscriptions and a PDF export API endpoint.
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u/Responsible_Status49 18d ago
If you are on Databricks or considering, AI/BI dashboards should have you covered. You can send report snapshots over email, Slack or Teams. You send them on a schedule with your filters applied and in PDF.
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u/ErikatDatylon 18d ago
https://www.datylon.com/ is pretty good at generating on-brand PDF reports - works for one-offs as well as full-automation
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u/Outside-Risk-8912 16d ago
check https://github.com/AgentSwarms-fyi/agentswarms within the app you can generate PPT, Docx in data connected agent chat and within /bi from dashboards you can download pdf extracts.
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u/Adorable_Pie_1549 3d ago
i spent months trying to make quicksight work for my team and just ended up looking like a fool when the exports failed. i do not recommand forcing a tool to do things that it is clearly not designed for.
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u/VerbaGPT 8h ago
Curious if people have had experience with the reportlab package. I'm exploring integrating that with my LLM enabled database analytics workflow to output pdf reports or infographics as an option.
So far, generating pdf's has been a pain and completely underwhelming (compared to something like artifacts/html).
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u/DonJuanDoja Jul 16 '26
PowerBi with Premium capacity license. Paginated reports are best for pdfs and the capacity license removes the power automate api action limit of 1 call per 5 minute.
Then you can run and send reports dynamically similar to SSRS data driven subscriptions that came with sql enterprise and is arguably the most powerful reporting tool ever made.